INTRODUCTION: Prematurely born preschoolers show developmental cognitive delay compared to full-term children. There are important neurological networks developing at preschool age related to perspective taking about the attribution of belief and to deduction with contrary-to-fact situations. Other deductive abilities may be completed during that period. METHOD: A group of very prematurely born children (N = 35) aged between 4 and 5 years was compared with a control group of children born at full term (N = 35)...

Why do individuals mentally modify reality (e.g., "If it hadn't rained, we would have won the game")? According to the dominant view, counterfactuals primarily serve to prepare future performance. In fact, individuals who have just failed a task tend to modify the uncontrollable features of their attempt (e.g., "If the rules of the game were different, I would have won it"), generating counterfactuals that are unlikely to play any preparatory role. By contrast, they generate prefactuals that focus on the controllable features of their ensuing behavior (e...

OBJECTIVE: In this study, we examined the mechanisms of action of complicated grief treatment (CGT), an efficacious psychotherapy for complicated grief. METHOD: We explored 3 putative mediators (guilt/self-blame related to the deceased, negative thoughts about the future, and avoidance) among treatment completers assigned to either CGT (n = 35) or interpersonal psychotherapy (n = 34) in a previously reported randomized controlled trial. Antidepressant use was examined as a moderator of mediation effects...

Experiential and associative learning are essential to optimal decision making. However, research shows that, even when exposed to repeated trials, people often fail to learn probabilities and cause/effect covariations. Consistent with the counterfactual inflation hypothesis, it is proposed that counterfactuals can interfere with memory of repeated exposures and therefore inhibit learning. Five experimental studies tested counterfactual thinking as a potential mechanism underlying this learning deficit using a simple, biased coin flipping paradigm...

As a personality trait, grit involves the tendency to strive to achieve long-term goals with continual passion and perseverance and plays an extremely crucial role in personal achievement. However, the neural mechanisms of grit remain largely unknown. In this study, we aimed to explore the association between grit and the fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) in 217 healthy adolescent students using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI). We found that an individual's grit was negatively related to the regional fALFF in the right dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), which is involved in self-regulation, planning, goal setting and maintenance, and counterfactual thinking for reflecting on past failures...

Counterfactual thinking (CFT) is a type of conditional reasoning that enables the generation of mental simulations of alternatives to past factual events. Previous research has found this cognitive feature to be disrupted in schizophrenia (Hooker et al., 2000; Contreras et al., 2016). At the same time, the study of cognitive deficits in unaffected relatives of people with schizophrenia has significantly increased, supporting its potential endophenotypic role in this disorder. Using an exploratory approach, the current study examined CFT for the first time in a sample of non-psychotic first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients (N = 43), in comparison with schizophrenia patients (N = 54) and healthy controls (N = 44)...

In two experiments, we investigated developmental change in the use of a counterfactual consoling strategy: "it could have been worse." In Experiment 1, 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults were presented with two stories in which a character feels bad as the result of an event that could have turned out better or could have turned out worse. Participants were asked what they would say or do to make the characters feel better. The results revealed that the frequency with which participants mentioned a counterfactual consoling strategy increased dramatically with age...

Regret and relief are associated with counterfactual thinking and are sensitive to various social contexts. In the present fMRI study, we investigated the neural basis for regret and relief and how social context (following vs. not following advice) modulates them by employing a sequential risk-taking task. Participants were asked to open a series of boxes consecutively until they decided to stop. Each box contained a reward (gold), except for one that contained an adverse stimulus (devil), which caused the participant to lose all the gold collected in that trial...

Recent evidence demonstrates remarkable overlap in the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying episodic memory, episodic future thinking, and episodic counterfactual thinking. However, the extent to which the phenomenological characteristics associated with these mental simulations change as a result of ageing remains largely unexplored. The current study employs adapted versions of the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire and the Autobiographical Interview to compare the phenomenological characteristics associated with both positive and negative episodic past, future, and counterfactual simulations in younger and older adults...

OBJECTIVE: Despite serious health risks, attitudes toward Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) medication use in college students remain favorable. Given the robust link between attitudes and behavior (e.g., the Theory of Planned Behavior), it is important to understand how these attitudes are developed and maintained. The current study examined the role of counterfactual, or "what if'" thinking as a mechanism for the development of attitudes toward ADHD medications. METHOD: All participants (n = 190) were asked to read either a positive or negative scenario regarding ADHD medication misuse and rate their attitudes toward the behavior; half of the participants were also asked to generate counterfactuals prior to rating their attitudes...

BACKGROUND: Counterfactual thinking is a specific type of conditional reasoning that enables the generation of mental simulations of alternatives to past factual events. Although it has been broadly studied in the general population, research on schizophrenia is still scarce. The aim of the current study was to further examine counterfactual reasoning in this illness. METHODS: Forty schizophrenia patients and 40 controls completed a series of tests that assessed the influence of the "causal order effect" on counterfactual thinking, and the ability to generate counterfactual thoughts and counterfactually derive inferences from a hypothetical situation...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: One's belief in good luck, and belief that it is a personal trait, could play a crucial role in gambling behavior, and can lead gamblers to have an irrational anticipation to win and to over-generalize their subjective sense of control. And upward counterfactual thinking has been considered to be a factor that offsets those irrational beliefs. This study examined the effects of belief in good luck and of upward counterfactual thinking on gambling behavior. METHODS: The subjects of the study were 52 college students who had been classified as non-problematic and non-pathological gamblers...

Understanding the causes of human behavior is essential for advancing one's interests and for coordinating social relations. The scientific study of how people arrive at such understandings or explanations has unfolded in four distinguishable epochs in psychology, each characterized by a different metaphor that researchers have used to represent how people think as they attribute causality and blame to other individuals. The first epoch was guided by an "intuitive scientist" metaphor, which emphasized whether observers perceived behavior to be caused by the unique tendencies of the actor or by common reactions to the requirements of the situation...

OBJECTIVE: Cognitive models of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) propose that rumination about a trauma may increase particular symptom clusters. One type of rumination, termed counterfactual thinking (CFT), refers to thinking of alternative outcomes for an event. CFT centered on a trauma is thought to increase intrusions, negative alterations in mood and cognitions (NAMC), and marked alterations in arousal and reactivity (AAR). The theorized relations between CFT and specific symptom clusters have not been thoroughly investigated...

Pretend play is a form of playful behavior that involves nonliteral action. Although on the surface this activity appears to be merely for fun, recent research has discovered that children's pretend play has connections to important cognitive and social skills, such as symbolic thinking, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning. The current article first defines pretend play and then reviews the arguments and evidence for these three connections. Pretend play has a nonliteral correspondence to reality, hence pretending may provide children with practice with navigating symbolic relationships, which may strengthen their language skills...

Counterfactual reasoning is a hallmark of human thought, enabling the capacity to shift from perceiving the immediate environment to an alternative, imagined perspective. Mental representations of counterfactual possibilities (e.g., imagined past events or future outcomes not yet at hand) provide the basis for learning from past experience, enable planning and prediction, support creativity and insight, and give rise to emotions and social attributions (e.g., regret and blame). Yet remarkably little is known about the psychological and neural foundations of counterfactual reasoning...

: Acceptance of chronic pain varies between patients but may also be expected to develop and change within patients. In this latter framework, the present study explored three psychological processes that may contribute to changes in acceptance: social comparisons, temporal comparisons and counterfactual comparisons. In general, these comparisons are used to cope with negative life events, and they may also play a role in acceptance of pain. In this study, the two subscales of the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (Activity Engagement and Pain Willingness) were complemented with a scale of Affective Acceptance...

People in a depressive state frequently believe that things could have happened differently in their lives, which is regarded as counterfactual thought. This study aimed to investigate whether the styles of counterfactual thought shown by people with indicating signs of depression and by people without any of those signs are different. Study participants were 42 adults divided into two groups: those with signs of depression and those without signs of depression. Five stories taken from newspapers and magazines and fictional scenarios were presented to the participants...

Depression and generalized anxiety, separately and as comorbid states, continue to represent a significant public health challenge. Current cognitive-behavioral treatments are clearly beneficial but there remains a need for continued development of complementary interventions. This manuscript presents two proof-of-concept studies, in analog samples, of "microinterventions" derived from regulatory focus and regulatory fit theories and targeting dysphoric and anxious symptoms. In Study 1, participants with varying levels of dysphoric and/or anxious mood were exposed to a brief intervention either to increase or to reduce engagement in personal goal pursuit, under the hypothesis that dysphoria indicates under-engagement of the promotion system whereas anxiety indicates over-engagement of the prevention system...